Tolstoy's 'charlatanism', of his historical disquisitions as 'farcical', as
'trickery' which takes in the unwary, injected by an 'autodidact' into
his work as an inadequate substitute for genuine knowledge. He
hastens to add that Tolstoy does, of course, make up for this by his
marvellous artistic genius; and then accuses him of inventing 'a system
which seems to solve everything very simply; as, for example, historical
fatalism: he mounts his hobby-horse and is off! only when he touches
earth does he, like Antaeus, recover his true strength'.t And the same
note is sounded in the celebrated and touching invocation sent by
Turgenev from his death-bed to his old friend and enemy, begging him
to cast away his prophet's mantle and return to his true vocation-that
of 'the great writer of the Russian land'. 3 Flaubert, despite his 'shouts
of admiration' over passages of Wtir and P�ace, is equally horrified : 'il
se repete et il philosophise,'f. he writes in a letter to Turgenev who had
sent him the French version of the masterpiece then almost unknown
outside Russia. In the same strain Belinsky's intimate friend and
correspondent, the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin, who
was well disposed to Tolstoy, writes to the poet Afanasy Fet: 'Literary
specialists . . . find that the intellectual element of the novel is very
weak, the philosophy of history is trivial and superficial, the denial of
the decisive influence of individual personalities on events is nothing
unpublished novel on the Decembrists, and Tolstoy's own scattered reflections
on this subject except in so far as they bear on vieWll expressed in War at�tl
P�ac�.
1 See E. I. Bogoslovsky, Turg�11tr1 DL. TDisiDifl (Tiflis, I 894), p. +I; quoted
by P. I. Biryukov, L. N. TDistoy (Berlin, 19zr), vol. :z, pp. 48-9.
I ibid.
1 Letter to Tolstoy of I I July 1 883.
' Gustave Flaubert, Lnms i"'Jit�s J T()llrgul•�ff (Monaco, I9+6), p. :z 18.
25
R U SSIAN TH I N K E R S
but a lot o f mystical subtlety, but apart from this the artistic gift of the
author is beyond dispute-yesterday I gave a dinner and Tyutchev was
here, and I am repeating what everybody said. '1 Contemporary
historians and military specialists, at least one of whom had himself
fought in 1 81 2,1 indignantly complained of inaccuracies of fact; and
since then damning evidence has been adduced of falsification of
historical detail by the author of War and Ptact,3 done apparently
with deliberate intent, in full knowledge of the available original
sources and in the known absence of any counter-evidence-falsification perpetrated, it seems, in the interests not so much of an artistic as of an 'ideological' purpose. This consensus of historical and aesthetic
criticism seems to have set the tone for nearly all later appraisals of
the 'ideological' content of War and Peace. Shelgunov at least honoured
it with a direct attack for its social quietism, which he called the 'philosophy of the swamp'; others for the most part either politely ignored it, or treated it as a characteristic aberration which they put down to
a combination of the well-known Russian tendency to preach (and
thereby ruin works of art) with the half-baked infatuation with
general ideas characteristic of young intellectuals in countries remote
from centres of civilisation. 'It is fortunate for us that the author is a
better artist than thinker' said the critic Dmitri Akhsharumov,• and
for more than three-quarters of a century this sentiment has been
echoed by most of the critics of Tolstoy, both Russian and foreign,
both pre-revolutionary and Soviet, both 'reactionary' and 'progressive',
by most of those who look on him primarily as a writer and an artist,
and of those to whom he is a prophet and a teacher, or a martyr, or a
social inRuence, or a sociological or psychological 'case'. Tolstoy's
theory of history is of equally little interest to Vogue and Merezhkovsky, to Stefan Zweig a'nd Percy Lubbock, to Biryukov and 1 A. A. Fet, Moi fJOipominaniya (Moscow, 1 890), part 2, p. 175.
I Se e the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military
historian, in his I8I2 god fl 'Yoint i mirt' (St Petersburg, 1 869), and the
tones of mounting indignation in the contemporary critical notices of A. S.
Norov, A. P. Pyatkovsky and S. Navalikhin. The lint served in the campaign
of 1 8 1 2 and, despite some errors of fact, makes criticisms of substance. The
last two are, as literary critics, almost worthless, but they seem to have taken
the trouble to veriljr some of the relevant facts.
a See V. B. Shklovsky, Mattr'yal i Jtil' fl romant L'fla Toiitogo 'Yoina i mir'
(Moscow, 1928), pa11im, but particularly chapter 7· See below, p. 42.
• Raz6or 'Yoiny i mira' (St Petersburg, 1 868), pp. 1 -4.
26
THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX
E. J. Simmons, not to speak of lesser men. Historians of Russian
thought1 tend to label this aspect of Tolstoy as 'fatalism', and move
on to the more interesting historical theories of Leontiev or Danilevsky. Critics endowed with more caution or humility do not go as far as this, but treat the 'philosophy' with nervous respect; even
Derrick Leon, who treats Tolstoy's views of this period with greater
care than the majority of his biographers, after giving a painstaking
account of Tolstoy's reflections on the forces which dominate history,
particularly of the second section of the long epilogue which follows
the end of the narrative portion of War and Ptoct, proceeds to follow
Aylmer Maude in making no attempt either to assess the theory
or to relate it to the rest of Tolstoy's life or thought; and even
so much as this is almost unique.1 Those, again, who are mainly
interested in Tolstoy as a prophet and a teacher concentrate on the
later doctrines of the master, held after his conversion, when he had
ceased to regard himself primarily as a writer ·and had established
himself as a teacher of mankind, an object of veneration and pilgrimage.
Tolstoy's life is normally represented as falling into two distinct parts:
first comes the author of immortal masterpieces, later the prophet of
personal and social regeneration; first the aristocratic writer, the difficult, somewhat unapproachable, troubled novelist of genius; then the 1 e.g. Professon Ilin, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others.
1 Honourable exceptions to this are provided by the writings of the Russian
writers N. I. Kareev and B. M. Eikhenbaum, as well as those of the French
scholars E. Haumant and Albert Sorel. Of monographs devoted to this subject
I know of only two of any worth. The lint, 'Filosofiya istorii L. N. Tolstogo',
by V. N. Pertsev, in 'Voina i mir: sburnik pll11lJati L. N. Tolrtogo, ed. V. P.
Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), after taking Tolstoy mildly
to task for obscurities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, swiftly retreats into
innocuous generalities. The other, 'Filosofiya istorii v romane L. N. Tolstogo,
"Voina i mir" ', by M. M. Rubinshtein, in Rtmltaya mysl' Ouly 191 1),
pp. 78-103, is much more laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish
nothing at all. (Very dilferent is Arnold Bennett's judgement, of which I
have learnt since writing this: 'The last part of the Epilogue is full of good